Brown Bag - Dr. Clara Muschkin
Please join us for the next Brown Bag Seminar of the Fall semester. The seminar will be held on November 4, 2009 in the Collaboratory Commons at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus. Refreshments will be served at 8:30am and the seminar will begin at 9:00am. Our guest will be Dr. Clara Muschkin, Director of the North Carolina Educational Research Data Center. Her talk is entitled "The 'Duke Data Set': Introduction to a Major K-12 Statewide Data Set for Longitudinal Research."
The North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC) supports researcher by providing access to administrative data on districts, schools, and students in user-friendly formats that are conducive to longitudinal analyses. The NCERDC has become one of the most productive collaborations between a state education department and education policy researchers in the United States. The richness of data and easy access fr researchers has inspired a wealth of cutting-edge research that is highly relevant to education policy and essential to education reform in North Carolina and nationwide.
Dr. Muschkin will provide an overview of the Data Center's history, mission, and activities. She will also outline the contents of the data archive, steps involves in the data use application process, and give examples of research projects using NCERDC data that inform education policy at the classroom, school, district, state, and national levels.
Dr. Clara Muschkin is a sociologist and demographer with an interdisciplinary research focus. In her research, she asks how education policies that shape the composition and organization of educational institutions can influence student behavior and academic performance. Her current research interest include: the impact of grade configuration on student behavior, the influence of retained and old-for-grade students on the behavior of grade peers, the effects of composition of district and school on race differences in student behavior and achievement across grade levels, predictors of success in community college, educational trajectories of youth involved in the criminal justice system, and implications of immigration for school enrollment trends.
Dr. Muschkin has a Ph.D in Sociology from Duke and is an assistant research professor of Public Policy Studies in the Sanford School of Public Policy, director of Undergraduate Education in the Center for Child and Family Policy, and director of the NCERDC. The mission of the NCERDC is to support and develop policy-oriented research on education, providing academic researchers with access to a wealth of data on North Carolina public schools, students, and teachers.